Alignment strategy for the ATLAS tracker

The ATLAS experiment is a multi-purpose particle detector that will study high-energy particle collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider. For the reconstruction of charged particles, and their production and their decay vertices, ATLAS is equipped with a sophisticated tracking system, unprecedented in size and complexity. Full exploitation of both the Inner Detector and the muon spectrometer requires an accurate alignment. The challenge of aligning the ATLAS tracking devices is discussed, and the ATLAS alignment strategy is presented and illustrated with both data and Monte Carlo results.